"Inland Empire": David Lynch's Fevered Foray into Digital

When David Lynch shot Inland Empire (2006), it was his first feature-long foray into the world of digital. Always an experimental director, Lynch more than embraced the challenge. He loved diving into the unknown, explaining how he “fell in love” with the possibilities of digital over the course of filming this project. Inland Empire is an exceptional example of how shooting in DV can change not just a film’s aesthetic particularity, but also the narrative structure, the malleability of the post-production phase, the director’s creative position, and the viewer’s psychological experience.

Lynch became radically wedded to the creative freedom that digital afforded him in terms of crafting narrative. When he began filming Inland Empire, he had no more than eight pages of script material and a threadbare premise: “A woman in trouble” was what the film “was about.” Digital afforded him the ability to improvise, to do longer takes and more of them, and to push actress Laura Dern to the utmost limit of her performance powers. He wrote one scene at a time, and each day the actors arrived onset, they were given script material that they had neither seen nor prepared. They were really no different from the characters in the movie – also actors starring in a new vaguely-defined film, which gets more and more disorienting as their performances bleed into reality. Inland Empire took an astounding three years to film, but the fluidity of the editing process, which Lynch extolled in interviews, allowed him to splice together many different scenes that were seemingly unrelated yet produced the coherent effect of a nightmare.

Filming on digital also permitted Lynch, as Dennis Lim puts it, to “follow the associative logic of hyperlinks,” by building on previous experimental projects and incorporating them into Inland Empire. Before embarking on his digital “magnum opus,” Lynch had created his own website, davidlynch.com, for miniseries and digital shorts. One of these shorts was called "Darkened Room," in which one girl is delivering a monologue to the camera, telling the audience, as she reaches out to touch the screen, that she “knows her friend is crying in the other room,” but that “she cannot see her.” The camera then switches to show a blond girl, hunched over on the couch, with mascara running down her cheeks, sobbing and evidently traumatized. This idea clearly came to bear on the structure of Inland Empire, in which two traumatized women also become connected through the digital screen, while occupying parallel universes.

With Inland Empire’s sprawl of screens and multiverses surpassing the convolutions of Lynch’s previous works, one cannot help but wonder if digital editing is not the optimal method for producing what Thomas Elsaesser calls the puzzle film. The common features of this sort of film - mentally unstable protagonists, simultaneity, the suspension of cause and effect, the inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality) - all apply to Lynch’s daring digital debut. But rather than surprising the audience with a “gotcha” moment, Inland Empire is a “bona fide mind-game” – its narrative thread unraveling in a way that mirrors the mental instability of Laura Dern’s character. It is also an organic puzzle film in a way that none of his previous films were. With Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Dr. (2001), Lynch was the director-Architect, drawing the films' convoluted blueprints before he started shooting. Inland Empire, on the other hand, was a dive headfirst into ill-defined territory. The narrative web simply wove itself outward over the course of the production, as Lynch created from within his characters’ maze.

Inland Empire also possesses a unique cosmic quality lacking in the much more purely paranoid works of Mulholland Dr. and Lost Highway. It is “a horror film with elements of the sublime” – an ethereal kaleidoscope of psychological intensity and an exploration of consciousness predicated on facing the pit of one’s fears. The way Lynch aesthetically translates this sublime horror owes itself to the digital medium he used. The graininess of the image, the screens within screens, certain ill-lit segments, and the unstable hand-held camera (impossible to ignore and always reminding us of Lynch’s hand in the film) all serve to heighten the power of Dern’s performance as a deeply troubled woman with a fractured identity in the grips of psychosis.

At times, Inland Empire feels very personal despite its abstracted aesthetic. It debunks the simplistic argument that digital will necessarily entail the dehumanization of film, or will obviate the need for quality acting. Much like Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation (2003), Inland Empire feels almost uncomfortably intimate. We are voyeurs peering into the private life of Dern’s character, but it hardly amounts to voyeurism’s classic definition as “pleasure from afar.” The way Lynch tracks Dern with his digital toy, often with extreme invasive close-ups, makes the film feel exploitative in the same way Tarnation was. The director-actor dynamic also feels more intense than in Lynch’s previous films, as if hand-held digital had propelled him to explore new, transgressive ways of capturing Dern’s inner state. “The look of horror on Dern’s face as she confronts the incomprehensible is something that simply resonates, no matter your understanding of Lynch’s labyrinthine dream world. It’s a pure display of both her immense range and startling power,” wrote Christopher Runyon in Movie Mezzanine. With Inland Empire, Lynch disproved the notion that digital was anathema to the talented actor.

Though Inland Empire spurred Lynch’s enthusiasm for digital, this fervor began to plateau once he set about reworking Twin Peaks into a digital film. Watching the reels of the original show, he succumbed to a bout of nostalgia, explaining that he had forgotten the beauty of the celluloid image. He has thus relinquished trying to take sides in the debate on the so-called "death" of film, instead advocating for the coexistence of film and digital as two mediums, which, in various cases, will be more suited to particular projects. Many critics felt, for example, that the digital medium was at the heart of Inland Empire’s artistic anatomy and its probing eye into the sprawling landscape of its protagonists’ psychological states. Critics even encouraged viewers to see it on a small screen rather than a large one, in order to embrace the digital viewing experience.

This is far from saying, however, that Inland Empire’s digital specificity precludes a discussion of it in the context of other art forms. Lynch’s background in painting is reflected in the film’s textures, lighting, shadows, and eye-catching configurations of color. Inland Empire’s hyper-real web also finds its counterpart in early experimental films like Maya Deren’s "Meshes of the Afternoon" (1943). In “An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film,” Deren conceptualized film as a kaleidoscope of images to be arranged in patterns by the viewer. Much like the visionaries of silent cinema, imagining the possibilities of the medium before they had the technology to execute them, there is something presciently proto-digital in Deren’s discussion of film as a dreamlike matrix.